We’re in the process of buying our first home and going through all this rigamarole paperwork nonsense. And every single fucking document they send us is full of errors!
We’re not exactly buying Southfork here, so I don’t imagine we’ve drawn their Ace Team. But gaaaaaaahhh! Stupid, sloppy mistakes – and when I call to point them out (Uh, that’s our ANNUAL salary, not “monthly” as the box states), they say “Oh, it’s OK, nobody reads that anyway”.
It’s the condescension that’s particularly irritating. There’s a box that clearly says “Seller’s Credits” (where you list the money they’ve offered to kick in towards closing costs). It’s blank. The money’s on another line, miscellaneous something or other, and I hear “Oh, we have to list it that way, it’s our only place for doing so, don’t worry.”
They even tried to charge us a processing fee based on the SALE PRICE, not the LOAN PRICE! Um, excuse me? I’m not paying you dime one for money I’m not borrowing from you!
Oh, and this was nice – our application packet sat on somebody’s desk for two days while she was out sick/on vacation. So now our closing might be delayed. Or not, depending on which financial whiz is responding to my questions.
Here’s the really sweet part — this isn’t some little rinky-dink bank. I thought I was improving my odds by going to the big bank where we have our account.
Fie! I say Fie to all of you Bankers! pffffffffffffftt!
My Hubby says he’s moving into that house on Thursday, come hell or high water. We’ll make the news as the first couple to break into a house in order to put things IN it.
I’m going through a lot of the same shit right now as well.
First, the co-op board lost my original application, but failed to tell anybody about it, so I assumed everything was proceeding as normal. My lawyer got the signed contract and I wrote a deposit check and everything. Then I get a panicked call from the realtor saying they never received the application and I have to send a new one. WTF times ten.
Then just the other day I got the mortgage commitment letter from the bank. The loan amount printed on it is nearly twice what I intend to borrow! (I am making a 50% downpayment, but come on, that’s not that unusual. Figure it out, godammit!)
Funny thing like this happened to me, and ended up working in my favour.
I took out a ‘personal loan’ from a local branch of one of the major national banks here in Aus. about 20 years ago. Met with the manager and we signed the contract together, with conditions outlining the repayments which worked out at $120 per month over three years or whatever it was. All good.
About 9 months later, I was going through the papers and, doing some simple sums, noticed that the repayment schedule would only just cover the principal of the loan plus a little teensie bit more: certainly not enough to also cover the interest payments, which in those days were running at something like 17%…the payments should have been up around $160 per month or thereabouts.
I contacted the bank to inform them of their error. They of course were delighted that I had 'fessed up, and proceeded to up the monthly payments even higher to cover the arrears we had accumulated. :smack:
Talking to a friend in commercial law enlightened me to the fact that when mistakes like this are made in contracts drawn up by such institutions as banks, then they are liable for the financial repercussions, not me. Had I not brought it to the bank’s attention, they would have been none the wiser, and the legal opinion was that I should not have to ‘pay’ for their errors.
I payed that loan off very quickly, with bugger-all interest.
The manager was offered a very early retirement just a few months later.
Eh. Wait’ll the bank declares you dead, and tells you that when you enquire as to why there’s no access to your accounts via the phone anymore. That’s a barrel of laughs! :rolleyes:
When I built the house I’m living in now, I actually laughed in the face of the bank manager at the bank my previous house was financed through. I won’t mention the bank by name [sub]Rhymes with Skank of Omerica[/sub] but they never did get things exactly right the whole time I had a mortgage with 'em. They had my name wrong, at one point the account number, I’d pay the monthly payment and it wouldn’t get credited, you name it they did it. Dumbest folks ever!
Needless to say I changed banks. The bank I went to is wonderful. Locally owned, nice people, actually know* what they’re doing!
That’s pretty funny. The original bank we had our mortgage through sold it to a certain unnamed bank (rhymes with “Rank of Homerica”) and they could never get our account right. They never did get our names spelled right (how hard is it to spell ‘Joseph’? Pretty hard, apparently.)
They also had a hard time crediting our payments to the correct account.
Morons.
Yeah well I guess this is what’s called a “useful lesson”. Except that after this experience (don’t get me started on the packing & moving part), I am never going to do this again! House has a yard, just bury my old bones out back.
According to my Mom, 9:30 a.m. is not too early to break out the wine.
I work for a very large mortgage lender. Trust me, the people working on your home loan are no smarter than anyone else, possibly even when “anyone else” includes small rodents.
Maybe your bank hires a lot of really bright people that spend their day on a certain message board deciding important things like who should play who in the Discworld movie or populating imaginary kingdoms and can’t be bothered with processing “work”?
Its not just home loans. I was once involved in a deal for a facory that had a sale price of over $100,000,000 and in an engineering evaluation I had to work with a banker.
The banker was trying to figure out the value of the plant if the lendee “walked” so in part of his evaluation he was taking the principal and calculating the depreciation.
His monster arror was that he was treating the depreciation like it was revenue. In other words, he figured that the plant lost $10,000,000 of value every year so he counted that as a cashflow into the baks “pocket”.
I crawed through his numbers for two hours (I just couldn’t believe that he would do something so stupid so I figured he must know something I didn’t) and then finally called up the finance honcho in my organization. The honcho took a look at the calcs and started laughing his ass off.
Even though we would have benefitted from the bankers mistake we pointed it out to him. Our honcho said that had we not corrected the banks stupidity it could possibly bloew up in our face when the deal got further along. The honcho said that he’s seen deals tank because the bank finally figured out some mistake at the last minute and then just scrapped the deal instead of trying to repair it.
Made me understand why the world economy is so screwed up.
